In Case You Missed It: Governor Walker is Moving Wisconsin Forward

Calls On Support of “Grassroots Army” to Stop Liberal Special Interests

November 13, 2017

[Madison, WI] — Governor Walker launched his campaign to keep moving Wisconsin forward last week, holding 13 rallies statewide and engaging supporters. Walker’s tour highlighted his bold reforms and called on grassroots conservatives for their support and organization as we head into 2018.

Read the full story from Christian Science Monitor online here or read excerpts below.

MADISON AND WAUKESHA, WIS.—Of all the states Hillary Clinton lost, perhaps none was as shocking as Wisconsin, with its long history of progressive politics.

But in retrospect, it shouldn’t have been.

While Democrats still outnumber Republicans here overall, that’s not the case among elected officials. From the legislature to the governorship, from the attorney general to the secretary of natural resources, the state is almost entirely controlled by Republicans – who, for the better part of a decade, have been steadily remaking it in their image.

Scott Walker won the governorship here as part of a nationwide Republican wave in 2010, and immediately set about turning the state’s finances around, eliminating a projected $3.6 billion deficit without raising taxes, by cutting funding for everything from schools to environmental research.

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Walker’s policies prompted the largest protests in Wisconsin since the Vietnam War, in the middle of winter, and a high-profile recall vote in 2012. Yet he not only won the recall election, but in doing so built a powerful state GOP machine that went on to play a key role in helping Donald Trump clinch the White House.

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At his campaign kick-off Sunday, Walker thanked the couple hundred supporters gathered at Weldall Manufacturing outside Milwaukee and asked for their prayers, saying he was the target of a national effort to unseat him.

“I’m going to need your help between now and next November,” he told the crowd, dotted with truck drivers and ladies with coiffed gray hair. “Because the best way to counter the tens of millions of dollars of the big-government special interests in Washington is through an army of grass-roots volunteers.”

Volunteers like Dick Fleissner, who became active in politics after he and his wife saved every single receipt for a year, back in 1997, and tallied how much they paid in taxes. A donut. Coffee. A refrigerator – everything went on the spreadsheet. The grand total: 48 percent of their household revenue.